When Mitt
Romney uttered the now famous phrase, “Corporations are people, too” back in
2011, he merely stated a fact. The American legal system classifies
corporations as “persons” for the purposes of many laws, such as owning
property, bringing a legal suit or being sued. This status does not extend to
all laws and rights, however -- a corporation cannot vote in an election or get
married, for instance.

The Supreme
Court of the United States has just decided it will hear a case to determine
whether corporations should be considered legal persons for the purposes of the
free “exercise of religion,” according to the First Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution.

The case
concerns the company Hobby Lobby, owned by David Green and his family, whose
religious convictions have impelled them to request an exemption from the
portion of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), often called Obamacare, that requires
the company to provide a health care insurance policy for its employees that
includes certain kinds of birth control to which they are religiously opposed.

This case
from the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals pits two claimed rights against each
other. Does Hobby Lobby have the right not to pay for health procedures that
violate its religious beliefs? Or, do the company’s employees have a right to
the same health-care benefits enjoyed by other U.S. citizens?

Look at the
first question in the previous paragraph. It does not make sense. Can a
corporation have “religious beliefs?” Can it “exercise” religion? Not really. A
corporation cannot attain salvation. It cannot be given eternal life, whether in
heaven or in hell. It cannot pray, take communion or even join a church. If a
corporation were Buddhist, could it achieve enlightenment? The mere idea is
absurd.

To be sure,
a company’s owners, board members and even employees can do those things. They
can “associate” or even “incorporate,” to use the legal terminology, and do
them together or help other people do them. But the corporate entity itself
does not “exercise” religion in these ways.

The 10th
Circuit argued that the corporation exercised religious belief by
proselytizing: “purchasing hundreds of newspaper ads to ‘know Jesus as Lord and
Savior.’” This logic is hard to follow. A company cannot be saved and it cannot
achieve eternal life, but it exercises religion because it advertises? Sounds more
like sales than proselytization.

A more
accurate way to characterize the interaction of corporations and religion is
that they are a tool. Companies are property that can be used for their owners’
purposes. Hobby Lobby, the company, was used as a tool to design and pay for
advertisements. Should a tool be given the ability to deny American citizens
their right to equal health care?

Well,
perhaps. American law has long understood that property rights give an owner
power over other persons. People are free to associate with whomever they wish,
as long as they do not do it on someone else’s land. Rights of free speech and
freedom to assemble that citizens exercise at the courthouse or in a downtown
public park, for example, can be restricted in a shopping mall if the owners
object.

In a similar
vein, then, if the owners of Hobby Lobby object to certain kinds of health care
procedures, on deep and sincere religious grounds, they should be able to use
their property rights in the corporation to deny their employees access to
those procedures. Right?

This is the
wrong legal analogy.

A better one
comes from tax law. Citizens may disagree with actions of the government. When
the United States declares war, for instance, those opposed to the war might
wish to disassociate themselves from it by refusing to pay taxes, or at least
the percentage of their taxes that would pay for the war. This approach,
however morally justified, has been declared illegal. So, if people cannot pick
and choose which taxes they pay, then corporations should not be able to pick
and choose which health care procedures they will insure.

In pilgrim
Massachusetts, the Puritan fathers thought their religious beliefs permitted
them to define the rights of the people in the colony. When the Bill of Rights
was adopted, the United States rejected that position. If the Puritans should
not have restricted people’s rights, why should a corporation?